The event kicked off on Thursday evening with a full house screening
of the documentary “The Feeling of Being Watched,”
which investigated a decade of FBI surveillance in the Muslim-American
community of Bridgeville, Illinois. The film was directed by Assia Boundaoui,
an Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker, who grew up in the surveilled
community. Following the screening, she participated in a Q&A with the
audience, moderated by Center Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel
Grinberg, where Boundaoui assessed her community’s collective trauma
of experiencing surveillance and how bringing light to the surveillance helped
to empower her community and herself.

Panelists argued for opening up the rigid parameters of
standardized journalism to include artists and to replace the myth of
objectivity, long held by journalists, with transparency and positionality.

The speakers highlighted the myriad and increasing risks
that media makers—in all of their capacities—face, from verbal and physical
attacks to digital surveillance and legal threats. The panelists argued that
long-afforded protections and policies in the United States, such as First
Amendment protections for journalists, are eroding in part because of increasing
rhetorical and physical attacks on the media by government actors and their
supporters. Rafsky said that Trump’s primary threats to the media in the United
States are the undermining of norms and his constant barrage of rhetorical
attacks against the media.

The panelists also identified surveillance as a specter that
sought to silence voices. Boundaoui said that many people in her community felt
like they were powerless against pervasive and long-standing FBI surveillance,
but she tried to show how documenting surveillance and watching the watchers
could help hold power to account and empower individual voices to push back.

Barbie Zelizer, Director of the Center for Media at Risk

Lisa Parks, MIT’s Global Media Technologies and Culture Lab

To reveal this surveillance, Boundaoui used the courts and
U.S. laws such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to prove that
surveillance was happening in her community. Yet she argued that these tools are
becoming bogged down because of insufficient infrastructure leading to an
increase in secrecy that is a threat to journalistic practice. Meanwhile, news
organizations engaged in investigative data journalism are concerned about the
overzealous implementation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which they fear
may be utilized against journalists who are scraping data from platforms to
create stories for the public.

To counteract some of the threats and attacks that are
occurring through digital infrastructure and legal regimes, journalists and
documentarian filmmakers are beginning to show interest in and are adopting
information security tools to better protect their communications, their data,
and their sources. Yet these tools and practices continue to face challenges,
including lack of usability, deadline pressures and lack of source knowledge of
such tools. And even if journalists are good at communicating securely, it does
not mean that their editors are. Dr. Aufderheide talked about how journalists
will communicate with sources on Signal and then their superior will send an
email with sensitive information, breaking the chain of security.

Patricia Aufderheide, American University

Sara Rafsky, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Parker Higgins, Freedom of the Press Foundation

Despite these myriad challenges, the panelists agreed that media
makers were becoming increasingly aware of the threats and attacks that they
face in response to their work as well as ways in which to mitigate them.